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Diaspora
By the end of the 30th century humanity has the capability to travel the universe, to journey beyond earth and beyond the confines of the vulnerable human frame.The descendants of centuries of scientific, cultural and physical development divide into fleshers — true Homo sapiens; Gleisner robots — embodying human minds within machines that interact with the physical world; and polises — supercomputers teeming with intelligent software, containing the direct copies of billions of human personalities now existing only in the virtual reality of the polis.Diaspora is the story of Yatima — a polis being created from random mutations of the Konishi polis base mind seed — and of humankind, Of an astrophysical accident that spurs the thousandfold cloning of the polises. Of the discovery of an alien race and of a kink in time that means humanity — whatever form it takes — will never again be threatened by acts of God.
443 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1997
About the author
Greg Egan
253 books2,538 followersGreg Egan specialises in hard science fiction stories with mathematical and quantum ontology themes, including the nature of consciousness. Other themes include genetics, simulated reality, posthumanism, mind transfer, sexuality, artificial intelligence, and the superiority of rational naturalism over religion.
He is a Hugo Award winner (and has been shortlisted for the Hugos three other times), and has also won the John W Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel. Some of his earlier short stories feature strong elements of supernatural horror, while due to his more popular science fiction he is known within the genre for his tendency to deal with complex and highly technical material (including inventive new physics and epistemology) in an unapologetically thorough manner.
Egan is a famously reclusive author when it comes to public appearances, he doesn't attend science fiction conventions, doesn't sign books and there are no photos available of him on the web.
Excerpted from Wikipedia.
He is a Hugo Award winner (and has been shortlisted for the Hugos three other times), and has also won the John W Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel. Some of his earlier short stories feature strong elements of supernatural horror, while due to his more popular science fiction he is known within the genre for his tendency to deal with complex and highly technical material (including inventive new physics and epistemology) in an unapologetically thorough manner.
Egan is a famously reclusive author when it comes to public appearances, he doesn't attend science fiction conventions, doesn't sign books and there are no photos available of him on the web.
Excerpted from Wikipedia.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 897 reviews
September 14, 2020
The Revised Book of Genesis
As is usual with everything by Egan, Diaspora is so densely packed with ideas that all summaries are inadequate. Only one comparison seems even remotely appropriate - to the biblical Book of Genesis.
Diaspora is a history of the re-creation of the universe, one in which there is no need for divine power to either start it off or continue its development. In fact, this is a history of how the defects and design flaws of the original creation story are corrected by hard experience. One of those flaws, perhaps the most destructive, is the vulnerability of the universe to arbitrary and uninformed divine intervention.
Egan lays out a blueprint for how a very different form of life than has been previously known comes into existence. Moving from the self-referential algorithms necessary to produce consciousness, to the algorithms of transformational topology necessary to impose that consciousness on the world coherently, he provides step by step instructions for the evolution of primitive pyschoblasts, embryonic minds as pure bits of energy, into citizens of the polis, an entirely electronic civilisation.
Such citizens are free to explore the Truth Mines containing not just the records of human experience, but the mathematical implications of that experience ‘experienced’ by its fellow-citizens. Through collective reasoning the polis has recognised that reliance on pure deduction is dangerous. It can lead to disaster, particularly that of exponential growth, as previous generations of the original creation had discovered on numerous occasions.
In other words there are limits to strictly mathematical reasoning: “The only way to grasp a mathematical concept was to see it in a multitude of different contexts, think through dozens of specific examples, and find at least two or three metaphors to power intuitive speculations... Understanding an idea meant entangling it so thoroughly with all the other symbols in your mind that it changed the way you thought about everything.” This is the function of art. Not just as a means of tempering mathematical logic, but as a way to find undiscovered truths - about ourselves as well as the rest of the universe.
The new creation of the polis has also learned how to interact with the old creation of flesh and blood. It can embody itself in robotic form and engage in productive discussion and planning with those unfortunate beings, us, who are the result of the original botched creation-attempt. Although Egan doesn’t claim it explicitly, this is functionally a new religion, one of the self-creation of the world and our total responsibility for it. A remarkable new theology generated from primordial circuitry.
As is usual with everything by Egan, Diaspora is so densely packed with ideas that all summaries are inadequate. Only one comparison seems even remotely appropriate - to the biblical Book of Genesis.
Diaspora is a history of the re-creation of the universe, one in which there is no need for divine power to either start it off or continue its development. In fact, this is a history of how the defects and design flaws of the original creation story are corrected by hard experience. One of those flaws, perhaps the most destructive, is the vulnerability of the universe to arbitrary and uninformed divine intervention.
Egan lays out a blueprint for how a very different form of life than has been previously known comes into existence. Moving from the self-referential algorithms necessary to produce consciousness, to the algorithms of transformational topology necessary to impose that consciousness on the world coherently, he provides step by step instructions for the evolution of primitive pyschoblasts, embryonic minds as pure bits of energy, into citizens of the polis, an entirely electronic civilisation.
Such citizens are free to explore the Truth Mines containing not just the records of human experience, but the mathematical implications of that experience ‘experienced’ by its fellow-citizens. Through collective reasoning the polis has recognised that reliance on pure deduction is dangerous. It can lead to disaster, particularly that of exponential growth, as previous generations of the original creation had discovered on numerous occasions.
In other words there are limits to strictly mathematical reasoning: “The only way to grasp a mathematical concept was to see it in a multitude of different contexts, think through dozens of specific examples, and find at least two or three metaphors to power intuitive speculations... Understanding an idea meant entangling it so thoroughly with all the other symbols in your mind that it changed the way you thought about everything.” This is the function of art. Not just as a means of tempering mathematical logic, but as a way to find undiscovered truths - about ourselves as well as the rest of the universe.
The new creation of the polis has also learned how to interact with the old creation of flesh and blood. It can embody itself in robotic form and engage in productive discussion and planning with those unfortunate beings, us, who are the result of the original botched creation-attempt. Although Egan doesn’t claim it explicitly, this is functionally a new religion, one of the self-creation of the world and our total responsibility for it. A remarkable new theology generated from primordial circuitry.
October 11, 2024
Folks, if exposure to Greg Egan has assured me of anything it's that I'm an idiot. You heard it here first, (unless you've been talking to my parents), or you're unusually perceptive and have penetrated the highly remunerated (citation please) intellectual vacuity with which I have inundated Goodreads over the past few years, in which case you're overly familiar with the fractal ineptitude which infests my being across all levels of magnification. But let's not carp and cavil over the pernicious effects of standpoint epistemology on our current, like, zeitgeist or whatevs. The point is (acute) I have become painfully aware of the misuses of science which litter my errrrrv, and so I've decided to fact check myself in real time as error prophylaxis. But let me start by saying that Mr. Egan does indeed have a way of leaving me disoriented to the point that I scramble like a dysgenic, near-sighted ferret through a twisting vortex of Wikipedia articles and matlab palaver which leaves me feelings like an utter midwit who would rather be either much smarter or somewhat dumber, because occupying the position of someone who is aware of the most rarefied kinds of thought and the incredible beauty they portend, but lacks the perspicacity to develop a personal mastery of, or a real aesthetic sensitivity to, said subjects - is perhaps the worst infinitesimal betwixt the polar extremes of sagacious endowment. Compounding the interest on my misery: In addition to being only smart enough to realize what a middling mind I possess, I am as stubborn as Winrar is in reminding me that it's time to upgrade to the full version each and every time I extract/compress information of questionable character. So I persist in attempting to understand that which lurks beyond my bailiwick with a violence commensurate with the first fist fight I ever attempted, (with a boy orders of magnitude my superior in melee forays, because he snatched a tater tot from my lunch tray with the imperious affect characteristic of apex predators), which is tantamount to getting my ass beaten so cartoonishly that I fall in my mashed potatoes, splatter a cup of peaches like a packet of ketchup twisted at one end and ran over by a car, and lay there for several minutes intoning a dolorous mantra which goes, "Oh god damn..." Over and over while sucking chocolate milk off the linoleum. So the real reason that Greg Egan is one of my favorite science fiction writers is because he takes me back to a gentler time.
But I've waffled enough, let me lean into this new mode of discourse with apposite quotationary peregrinations.
Plutarch once remarked that the mind is a terrible thing to taste. (A measure zero probability.) Written records descant - at length - (redundant) about his inability to enjoy science fiction unless it's delivery was sufficiently rigid (ie. A good hard (ie. Mencken's proposition that: Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.) impecunious (unnecessary) railing (but crucially not a paling, palisade, balustrade, banister, hurdle, barrier, parapet. But rather a seriously deep redacted in the redacted or redacted or redacted or, Vishnu forbid, redacted.) (Redact me! I'm getting carried away, huh?). (False.) But he did recommend that one not inject to brimmage their frontal lobes with hydrochloric acid in the pursuit of knowledge, (which even Dahmer would later admit is so inimical to the project of cognition that it rendered one unable to function as even a grotesque kink-zombie) (gratuitous and possibly offensive), but kindling a fire in the 'ole brainpan worthy of searing a tomahawk steak. (A paraphrasing of significant informational infidelity). (More concise reconstruction:) Which is to say: wreathe one's cerebellum in a corona of beef mediated heat distortion caused by the differential refractive indices of red and blue thoughts moving through pulverulent concave mirror networks distributed in the glial substrate (scientific mischaracterization of heat mirages and flat out misrepresentation of myriad neurobiological processes). (Of special interest is the idea that Taco fumes are extremely heavy and not easily evicted from basements and require nothing less than the total extirpation of offending particulates by a supernatural entity of staggering statistical literacy and superior bean counting ability, (ie. Maxwell's demon), once the offending odor has become entrenched in one's subterranean lodgings, and only then can one ever resume harmonious olfactory relations with their surroundings and be free of chronic cephalic (not to be confused with a genre of porn created by intrepid Japanese animators in order to circumvent draconian censorship laws - but conditioned physiological responses to food), insulin secretion). (Logically indefensible but emotionally salient.) In other words: What if nature cannot be cognized as a whole? It may well be that nature is utterly chaotic, with no law to subsume the apparent heterogeneity, no concept capable of whittling down its ever-increasing complexity. (Not pertinent and bordering dangerously on postmodern sentiments which, if taken to the ludicrous intellectual apogee of certain firebrands, would result in the shattering of our communal sense making apparatus and thus fatally stifle the human project and leave us all sucking chocolate milk off a piebald cafeteria floor). So what did he actually say? Well, it ain't about filling a vessel, it's about kindling a flame. (Colloquially disfigured but conceptually aligned.) In this respect, one might imagine that Egan is fond of welding your zipper shut and reducing your head to a smoldering baseball. (Mr. Egan has, as far as I can tell, never publicly evinced enthusiasm for arc welding or hurling bolts of lightning.)
Many nights have passed with me attempting to contain the fissile material deposited by this far future, post-singularity tale, (False: I spend most nights lying near the neighbor’s fence and using a deer caller to mimic the sounds of a randy buck until the sudden incandescent starburst of his high watt porch light herald’s his be-slippered arrival and he inevitably calls out in a hoarse whisper: “Is that you Ted?” Which causes me to fight back laughter so hard that my entire body convulses like a tased suspect and I begin wheezing like a hyena with a collapsed trachea.) and I'll be honest, the NRC is livid, (I am unknown to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) because these soft tissues are not constructed in accordance with § 71.51, and there is a non-trivial amount of leakage. (True but contextually confused.) These are ideas which irradiate vesperal musings, mutate the morphean DNA which vitiates peaceful slumber, and bestow an agonizing death via ionized grapeshot on anserine fuck-abouts who breach the containment zone of this corium blancmange in expectation of a breezy space opera (a mere metaphor overindulged, an impulse gratified to excess - but also Greg Egan might actually damage the integrity of your organic hardisk in a way which causes your individual unit to fall far afoul of typical MTBFs/AFRs (mean time between failures and annualized failure rates, respectively) Say, causing the peripatetic read/write head of your attention to go rigid like smooth muscles in the presence of phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitors and nitric oxide, which in turn suddenly diddles the precariously perched storage it normally hovers above like the breath of a creeper in a manner so lascivious that the extremely thin layer of non-electrostatic lubricant, which normally causes the perp’s pervy transducer region to harmlessly richochet, is terminally engraved by the insistence of this newly rigid armature. (ie. My boy Greg might literally fucking kill you if your state ain’t solid.)
Herein pontificated upon are the digitized, self-referential algorithms sufficient to instantiate consciousness. Embryonic minds of pure energy inhabiting electronic civilizations. Utilizing fantastical physics such as Kozuch Theory, which treats elementary particles as semi-point-like wormholes, whose properties can be explained entirely in terms of their geometries in six dimensions. Masses of virus-sized nanomachines that dismantle a human body and record the brain's information states as it is chemically converted into a crystalline computer. The arbitrary parameters of the simulated realities and their intriguing manipulations. The philosophical implications of a humanity freed from long immurement in the oubliette of ancestral biology, and where desire, once bound by these biological imperatives, discharges itself in a post human context. (Correct but incomplete.)
But I've waffled enough, let me lean into this new mode of discourse with apposite quotationary peregrinations.
Plutarch once remarked that the mind is a terrible thing to taste. (A measure zero probability.) Written records descant - at length - (redundant) about his inability to enjoy science fiction unless it's delivery was sufficiently rigid (ie. A good hard (ie. Mencken's proposition that: Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.) impecunious (unnecessary) railing (but crucially not a paling, palisade, balustrade, banister, hurdle, barrier, parapet. But rather a seriously deep redacted in the redacted or redacted or redacted or, Vishnu forbid, redacted.) (Redact me! I'm getting carried away, huh?). (False.) But he did recommend that one not inject to brimmage their frontal lobes with hydrochloric acid in the pursuit of knowledge, (which even Dahmer would later admit is so inimical to the project of cognition that it rendered one unable to function as even a grotesque kink-zombie) (gratuitous and possibly offensive), but kindling a fire in the 'ole brainpan worthy of searing a tomahawk steak. (A paraphrasing of significant informational infidelity). (More concise reconstruction:) Which is to say: wreathe one's cerebellum in a corona of beef mediated heat distortion caused by the differential refractive indices of red and blue thoughts moving through pulverulent concave mirror networks distributed in the glial substrate (scientific mischaracterization of heat mirages and flat out misrepresentation of myriad neurobiological processes). (Of special interest is the idea that Taco fumes are extremely heavy and not easily evicted from basements and require nothing less than the total extirpation of offending particulates by a supernatural entity of staggering statistical literacy and superior bean counting ability, (ie. Maxwell's demon), once the offending odor has become entrenched in one's subterranean lodgings, and only then can one ever resume harmonious olfactory relations with their surroundings and be free of chronic cephalic (not to be confused with a genre of porn created by intrepid Japanese animators in order to circumvent draconian censorship laws - but conditioned physiological responses to food), insulin secretion). (Logically indefensible but emotionally salient.) In other words: What if nature cannot be cognized as a whole? It may well be that nature is utterly chaotic, with no law to subsume the apparent heterogeneity, no concept capable of whittling down its ever-increasing complexity. (Not pertinent and bordering dangerously on postmodern sentiments which, if taken to the ludicrous intellectual apogee of certain firebrands, would result in the shattering of our communal sense making apparatus and thus fatally stifle the human project and leave us all sucking chocolate milk off a piebald cafeteria floor). So what did he actually say? Well, it ain't about filling a vessel, it's about kindling a flame. (Colloquially disfigured but conceptually aligned.) In this respect, one might imagine that Egan is fond of welding your zipper shut and reducing your head to a smoldering baseball. (Mr. Egan has, as far as I can tell, never publicly evinced enthusiasm for arc welding or hurling bolts of lightning.)
Many nights have passed with me attempting to contain the fissile material deposited by this far future, post-singularity tale, (False: I spend most nights lying near the neighbor’s fence and using a deer caller to mimic the sounds of a randy buck until the sudden incandescent starburst of his high watt porch light herald’s his be-slippered arrival and he inevitably calls out in a hoarse whisper: “Is that you Ted?” Which causes me to fight back laughter so hard that my entire body convulses like a tased suspect and I begin wheezing like a hyena with a collapsed trachea.) and I'll be honest, the NRC is livid, (I am unknown to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) because these soft tissues are not constructed in accordance with § 71.51, and there is a non-trivial amount of leakage. (True but contextually confused.) These are ideas which irradiate vesperal musings, mutate the morphean DNA which vitiates peaceful slumber, and bestow an agonizing death via ionized grapeshot on anserine fuck-abouts who breach the containment zone of this corium blancmange in expectation of a breezy space opera (a mere metaphor overindulged, an impulse gratified to excess - but also Greg Egan might actually damage the integrity of your organic hardisk in a way which causes your individual unit to fall far afoul of typical MTBFs/AFRs (mean time between failures and annualized failure rates, respectively) Say, causing the peripatetic read/write head of your attention to go rigid like smooth muscles in the presence of phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitors and nitric oxide, which in turn suddenly diddles the precariously perched storage it normally hovers above like the breath of a creeper in a manner so lascivious that the extremely thin layer of non-electrostatic lubricant, which normally causes the perp’s pervy transducer region to harmlessly richochet, is terminally engraved by the insistence of this newly rigid armature. (ie. My boy Greg might literally fucking kill you if your state ain’t solid.)
Herein pontificated upon are the digitized, self-referential algorithms sufficient to instantiate consciousness. Embryonic minds of pure energy inhabiting electronic civilizations. Utilizing fantastical physics such as Kozuch Theory, which treats elementary particles as semi-point-like wormholes, whose properties can be explained entirely in terms of their geometries in six dimensions. Masses of virus-sized nanomachines that dismantle a human body and record the brain's information states as it is chemically converted into a crystalline computer. The arbitrary parameters of the simulated realities and their intriguing manipulations. The philosophical implications of a humanity freed from long immurement in the oubliette of ancestral biology, and where desire, once bound by these biological imperatives, discharges itself in a post human context. (Correct but incomplete.)
August 15, 2016
“Yatima surveyed the Doppler-shifted stars around the polis, following the frozen, concentric waves of colour across the sky from expansion to convergence. Ve wondered what account they should give of themselves when they finally caught up with their quarry. They’d brought no end of questions to ask, but the flow of information couldn’t all be one-way. When the Transmuters demanded to know ‘Why have you followed us? Why have you come so far?’, where should ve begin?”
Where indeed? Initially, the first twenty or so pages of Diaspora made no sense to me, the words seem to have originated from a parallel universe where, presumably, they make perfect sense there. To be honest I briefly considered giving it up even at that early stage. Still, the USD 6.58 I paid for my copy demands that I get every hard-earned penny worth or die trying. So I did something I seldom do, I checked out reviews of this book on Goodreads and other websites, on some of these reviews certain key concepts are clearly explained. After that, I reread those initial ten pages again and this time it makes enough sense to continue. Better still, around page 50 my jaw dropped, and I thought “Wow! Far out!”
Diaspora is set in the far future, more than 1000 years from now. Humanity have evolved or developed into three strands. The “fleshers” are biological transhumans, including modified humans (people with gills, wings, and whatnot), the “gleisner robots” are human minds, digitalized and residing in machines, and the “citizens”, originally these were humans who have uploaded their consciousness into computers as sentient software, successive generations were entirely created inside computers. After an unexpected cosmic disaster kills off billions of fleshers the gleisner robots and the citizens go out into space to search for a way to save humanity from future disasters of this kind (the fleshers guys are not really in a position to contribute).
While the narrative switches to a few point of view characters, one particular character can be singled out as the protagonist, a citizen called Yatima. The novel starts with ver* frame narrative then the author depicts vis* beginning as a kind of raw data strand, then the OS develops her into a fully sentient being in software form. The stages of ver development from raw data to personhood is explained in detail by Egan, I don't understand most of the science but enough of it makes sense to blow my mind. Greg Egan really puts the “hard” back into hard science fiction.
A more representative book cover
His brand of sci-fi is extremely clever but often not accessible to those of us who do not have a strong grounding in several branches of science, particularly biochemistry, physics, astrophysics, and computer science. That said, I don't want to dissuade anyone from reading his books, he is a very capable storyteller, his plot can generally be followed even if you don't understand some of the scientific basis of the story. His characters are mostly quite well written, in spite of many of them not being quite human. By the middle of the book, I was expecting to rate diaspora five stars and recommend that everybody in the world should read it. Unfortunately, Greg Egan's advanced scientific and mathematical expositions soon begin to overwhelm me and the narrative becomes harder and harder to follow. Here is an example passage:
“The macrosphere’s four-dimensional standard fibre yielded a much smaller set of fundamental particles than the ordinary universe’s six-dimensional one. In place of six flavours of quarks and six flavours of leptons there was just one of each, plus their antiparticles. There were gluons, gravitons and photons, but no W or Z bosons, since they mediated the process of quarks changing flavour. Three quarks or three antiquarks together formed a charged ‘nucleon’ or ‘anti-nucleon’, similar to an ordinary proton or antiproton, and the sole lepton and its antiparticle were much like an electron and positron, but there was no combination of quarks analogous to a neutron.”
If the above paragraph makes sense to you don’t even bother with the rest of this review, you don’t need to know what a science ignoramus thinks, just go and grab a copy of Diaspora today. To be honest, I have no idea what that paragraph means. I am sure that if I understood it I would be amazed at his ingenious application of whatever scientific principle he is describing. As it is, whenever Egan goes into his super science mode, my attention starts to drift away from the narrative as it is not anchored to anything I can understand. There are too many passages like that in the second half of the book for me to concentrate on the story. While I greatly admire the book and love at least half of it I was quite relieved when I arrived at the end because by then I was no longer so engrossed by it. So, my scientific ignorance notwithstanding, Diaspora is a work of staggering imagination.
Excellent Hungarian cover
I do recommend this book with some caveats. For readers with the capability to understand much of the advance science I recommend this book very highly. For less learned persons like myself, I would recommend it with a caution that a substantial part of the book may go over your head but it is still a good mind stretcher, a gymnasium for the imagination. I did feel frustrated with it from time to time but I am still glad I read it. If you never read anything by Greg Egan before I suggest starting with Permutation City which also features characters who are living software. I find Permutation City to be much more accessible and also mind-expanding.
___________________
Notes:
*Due to lack of gender among most of the citizens, a new set of pronouns are used: ve, ver, and vis. Ve is the subject pronoun used in place of he and she, ver is the object pronoun (instead of him or her), and vis is the possessive pronoun (in place of his and her). A few citizens do choose to have a gender, however, when you are a piece of software you can be anything.
• It also helps to understand the word “polis”, to help access the early part of the book. Nothing to do with cops, a polis is basically a computer system hosting citizens. There are several polises on Earth, we are only introduced to a few.
• How would you like to be a "Citizen", a software transhuman? I personally would not mind, the "dev" may be able to debug me, this would probably take a while!
• A writer at Tor.com asks “Why Isn’t Greg Egan A Superstar?”. I do think he is great, but I am not surprised he is not a “superstar”. His books are much smarter than John Scalzi’s bestsellers but much more demanding to read and much less commercial. I have a feeling he doesn’t care, he writes what he wants to write, no compromises, kudos to him.
• Star rating: I think objectively it is worth 5 stars, subjectively, in term of accessibility to me I would rate it at:
___________________
Quotes:
“Paolo assimilated all the stored transmissions from his Earth-self – almost three hundred years’ worth – before composing a reply.”
Cloning versions of yourself is easy when you are a software person.
“Fleshers used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to “conquer” Earth, to steal their “precious” physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of “competition” . . . as if a species capable of making the journey wouldn’t have had the power, or the wit, or the imagination, to rid itself of obsolete biological imperatives. Conquering the galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would do – knowing no better, having no choice.”
I love this passage. Very sage.
“He’d found Blanca’s rigorous six-dimensional space-time curvature treatment heavy going, and he’d skimmed over the hard parts where the Einstein tensor equation was derived by approximating the interactions between massive particles and virtual gravitons.”
Even one of the characters finds some of the science-heavy going!
“At both ends of the linear accelerator, electron-positron pairs were created in small cyclotrons; the positrons were retained in storage rings, while the electrons were fed straight into the main accelerator. The opposing beams met in the centre of the Forge, and if two electrons collided head-on, fast enough to overcome electrostatic repulsion, Kozuch Theory predicted that they’d splice wormholes.
No idea what this means, apart from splicing wormholes bit.
Where indeed? Initially, the first twenty or so pages of Diaspora made no sense to me, the words seem to have originated from a parallel universe where, presumably, they make perfect sense there. To be honest I briefly considered giving it up even at that early stage. Still, the USD 6.58 I paid for my copy demands that I get every hard-earned penny worth or die trying. So I did something I seldom do, I checked out reviews of this book on Goodreads and other websites, on some of these reviews certain key concepts are clearly explained. After that, I reread those initial ten pages again and this time it makes enough sense to continue. Better still, around page 50 my jaw dropped, and I thought “Wow! Far out!”
Diaspora is set in the far future, more than 1000 years from now. Humanity have evolved or developed into three strands. The “fleshers” are biological transhumans, including modified humans (people with gills, wings, and whatnot), the “gleisner robots” are human minds, digitalized and residing in machines, and the “citizens”, originally these were humans who have uploaded their consciousness into computers as sentient software, successive generations were entirely created inside computers. After an unexpected cosmic disaster kills off billions of fleshers the gleisner robots and the citizens go out into space to search for a way to save humanity from future disasters of this kind (the fleshers guys are not really in a position to contribute).
While the narrative switches to a few point of view characters, one particular character can be singled out as the protagonist, a citizen called Yatima. The novel starts with ver* frame narrative then the author depicts vis* beginning as a kind of raw data strand, then the OS develops her into a fully sentient being in software form. The stages of ver development from raw data to personhood is explained in detail by Egan, I don't understand most of the science but enough of it makes sense to blow my mind. Greg Egan really puts the “hard” back into hard science fiction.
A more representative book cover
His brand of sci-fi is extremely clever but often not accessible to those of us who do not have a strong grounding in several branches of science, particularly biochemistry, physics, astrophysics, and computer science. That said, I don't want to dissuade anyone from reading his books, he is a very capable storyteller, his plot can generally be followed even if you don't understand some of the scientific basis of the story. His characters are mostly quite well written, in spite of many of them not being quite human. By the middle of the book, I was expecting to rate diaspora five stars and recommend that everybody in the world should read it. Unfortunately, Greg Egan's advanced scientific and mathematical expositions soon begin to overwhelm me and the narrative becomes harder and harder to follow. Here is an example passage:
“The macrosphere’s four-dimensional standard fibre yielded a much smaller set of fundamental particles than the ordinary universe’s six-dimensional one. In place of six flavours of quarks and six flavours of leptons there was just one of each, plus their antiparticles. There were gluons, gravitons and photons, but no W or Z bosons, since they mediated the process of quarks changing flavour. Three quarks or three antiquarks together formed a charged ‘nucleon’ or ‘anti-nucleon’, similar to an ordinary proton or antiproton, and the sole lepton and its antiparticle were much like an electron and positron, but there was no combination of quarks analogous to a neutron.”
If the above paragraph makes sense to you don’t even bother with the rest of this review, you don’t need to know what a science ignoramus thinks, just go and grab a copy of Diaspora today. To be honest, I have no idea what that paragraph means. I am sure that if I understood it I would be amazed at his ingenious application of whatever scientific principle he is describing. As it is, whenever Egan goes into his super science mode, my attention starts to drift away from the narrative as it is not anchored to anything I can understand. There are too many passages like that in the second half of the book for me to concentrate on the story. While I greatly admire the book and love at least half of it I was quite relieved when I arrived at the end because by then I was no longer so engrossed by it. So, my scientific ignorance notwithstanding, Diaspora is a work of staggering imagination.
Excellent Hungarian cover
I do recommend this book with some caveats. For readers with the capability to understand much of the advance science I recommend this book very highly. For less learned persons like myself, I would recommend it with a caution that a substantial part of the book may go over your head but it is still a good mind stretcher, a gymnasium for the imagination. I did feel frustrated with it from time to time but I am still glad I read it. If you never read anything by Greg Egan before I suggest starting with Permutation City which also features characters who are living software. I find Permutation City to be much more accessible and also mind-expanding.
___________________
Notes:
*Due to lack of gender among most of the citizens, a new set of pronouns are used: ve, ver, and vis. Ve is the subject pronoun used in place of he and she, ver is the object pronoun (instead of him or her), and vis is the possessive pronoun (in place of his and her). A few citizens do choose to have a gender, however, when you are a piece of software you can be anything.
• It also helps to understand the word “polis”, to help access the early part of the book. Nothing to do with cops, a polis is basically a computer system hosting citizens. There are several polises on Earth, we are only introduced to a few.
• How would you like to be a "Citizen", a software transhuman? I personally would not mind, the "dev" may be able to debug me, this would probably take a while!
• A writer at Tor.com asks “Why Isn’t Greg Egan A Superstar?”. I do think he is great, but I am not surprised he is not a “superstar”. His books are much smarter than John Scalzi’s bestsellers but much more demanding to read and much less commercial. I have a feeling he doesn’t care, he writes what he wants to write, no compromises, kudos to him.
• Star rating: I think objectively it is worth 5 stars, subjectively, in term of accessibility to me I would rate it at:
___________________
Quotes:
“Paolo assimilated all the stored transmissions from his Earth-self – almost three hundred years’ worth – before composing a reply.”
Cloning versions of yourself is easy when you are a software person.
“Fleshers used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to “conquer” Earth, to steal their “precious” physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of “competition” . . . as if a species capable of making the journey wouldn’t have had the power, or the wit, or the imagination, to rid itself of obsolete biological imperatives. Conquering the galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would do – knowing no better, having no choice.”
I love this passage. Very sage.
“He’d found Blanca’s rigorous six-dimensional space-time curvature treatment heavy going, and he’d skimmed over the hard parts where the Einstein tensor equation was derived by approximating the interactions between massive particles and virtual gravitons.”
Even one of the characters finds some of the science-heavy going!
“At both ends of the linear accelerator, electron-positron pairs were created in small cyclotrons; the positrons were retained in storage rings, while the electrons were fed straight into the main accelerator. The opposing beams met in the centre of the Forge, and if two electrons collided head-on, fast enough to overcome electrostatic repulsion, Kozuch Theory predicted that they’d splice wormholes.
No idea what this means, apart from splicing wormholes bit.
July 31, 2012
I want to give this book five stars. I want to give this book one star. It’s amazing. It’s terrible.
Keeping Earth habitable is a pressing concern today. Even if we manage to avoid eco-catastrophe (and I’m optimistic on this), that’s only a small hurdle in the grand scheme of the cosmos. We only have about a billion years left before the Sun swells so much that it cooks the atmosphere. A few billion years after that, the Sun will engulf Earth itself—bye, bye, homeworld. Even if we manage to emigrate to the outer solar system or other solar systems entirely, we’re still just buying time until the end of the universe—whether it’s heat death or a Big Crunch or something else entirely. We can’t outrun eternity.
Of course, if we are around in a billion, let alone ten billion years, I somehow doubt we would recognize our future selves. Considering how much we differ from our hominin ancestors a million years ago, I suspect that evolution—natural or artificially-induced—will carry us away from this body plan. If we are going to migrate, we will adapt our forms—in body, or just in mind. Diaspora is a vision of a possible future, one in which humanity has diversified itself, speciated itself, and it attempting to find a way to survive.
Diaspora is a challenging novel, intentionally so. It is no-holds-barred, no-punches-pulled posthumanity. By the thirtieth century, humanity exists in three forms: flesh humans on Earth, embodied robots floating around the outer solar system, and polises of minds running as software on immense architectures. The main characters are exclusively minds from a polis. After an unanticipated, unexplained gamma-ray burst irradiates Earth, precipitating the extinction of flesh humanity, these minds resolve to explain the phenomenon and find a way of protecting humanity from it in the future. This triggers a strange and wonderful exploration of physical space and theoretical physics, and more mathematical exposition than you can shake a stick at.
The bulk of this book is a discussion of high-level mathematics and highly theoretical, even speculative, physics. Everything from high-energy wormholes to alternative universe topologies makes an appearance here. As a mathematician, and one who loves the abstract, axiomatic fields, I enjoyed most of this. It’s nice to step into someone else’s series of “what if” scenarios. When these are combined with the exploration of the physical universe and encounters with extraterrestrial life, it’s even cooler. The ideas that Egan explores here are intriguing enough to make me want to give Diaspora 5 stars—if it were a blog post, maybe.
Greg Egan bypasses the conventional structure of a novel, giving us instead mathematical musings in four acts. Technically Diaspora has everything a novel needs: characters, dialogue, even a plot. But with nature as the sole antagonist, the threats in this book are extremely distant. They are existential (though I hesitate to use that word when these characters are cloning themselves thousands of times over), but only in the most distant sense. This is literally a book about the end of the world as we don’t know it, and it’s almost as difficult for me to wrap my head around as the physics and mathematics are.
I think it would be tempting to seize upon the very abstract subject matter and level the charge that Diaspora is difficult because, with so many posthumans leaving flesh behind for a sixteen-dimensional universe, it loses something of what it means to be human. I understand why some people would feel this way, but I don’t think it’s the case at all. In spite of the very technical and dry dialogue between these characters, Egan makes it clear that their main concern—other than survival—is the preservation of humanity. There are, if not conflicts, then arguments between characters about the best path to take to remain human—the merits of flesh versus software, the perils of solipsism. Indeed, Diaspora is about the ultimate quest to remain human in spite of the universe itself stacking the deck against you.
I’m not going to give Diaspora five stars, because I think other authors have done this better while still delivering a very compelling story. I’m not going to give Diaspora one star, because it is an amazing collection of ideas and dialogues about humanity, progress, and physics. It’s like a really trippy blog post, just masquerading as a novel because novels, like bow ties, are cool. And like anything pretending to be something it’s not, Diaspora isn’t quite as satisfying as the conventional novel we’ve been trained to enjoy. It’s not bad, but different, and anything too different has to work a lot harder to earn acclaim. I’m willing to meet it halfway, so I’ll give it a solid three stars.
I majored in math and minored in English and philosophy; I’m teaching math and English to high school students come this fall. The intersectionality of this novel is kind of tailor-made for me—I suspect other people might have a hard time with it, and I want to be very upfront with this opinion lest my enthusiasm for the subject lead you astray. But if you are willing to make the effort and tolerate the paper-thin plot, then … wow. Yeah, in a way, totally worth it.
Keeping Earth habitable is a pressing concern today. Even if we manage to avoid eco-catastrophe (and I’m optimistic on this), that’s only a small hurdle in the grand scheme of the cosmos. We only have about a billion years left before the Sun swells so much that it cooks the atmosphere. A few billion years after that, the Sun will engulf Earth itself—bye, bye, homeworld. Even if we manage to emigrate to the outer solar system or other solar systems entirely, we’re still just buying time until the end of the universe—whether it’s heat death or a Big Crunch or something else entirely. We can’t outrun eternity.
Of course, if we are around in a billion, let alone ten billion years, I somehow doubt we would recognize our future selves. Considering how much we differ from our hominin ancestors a million years ago, I suspect that evolution—natural or artificially-induced—will carry us away from this body plan. If we are going to migrate, we will adapt our forms—in body, or just in mind. Diaspora is a vision of a possible future, one in which humanity has diversified itself, speciated itself, and it attempting to find a way to survive.
Diaspora is a challenging novel, intentionally so. It is no-holds-barred, no-punches-pulled posthumanity. By the thirtieth century, humanity exists in three forms: flesh humans on Earth, embodied robots floating around the outer solar system, and polises of minds running as software on immense architectures. The main characters are exclusively minds from a polis. After an unanticipated, unexplained gamma-ray burst irradiates Earth, precipitating the extinction of flesh humanity, these minds resolve to explain the phenomenon and find a way of protecting humanity from it in the future. This triggers a strange and wonderful exploration of physical space and theoretical physics, and more mathematical exposition than you can shake a stick at.
The bulk of this book is a discussion of high-level mathematics and highly theoretical, even speculative, physics. Everything from high-energy wormholes to alternative universe topologies makes an appearance here. As a mathematician, and one who loves the abstract, axiomatic fields, I enjoyed most of this. It’s nice to step into someone else’s series of “what if” scenarios. When these are combined with the exploration of the physical universe and encounters with extraterrestrial life, it’s even cooler. The ideas that Egan explores here are intriguing enough to make me want to give Diaspora 5 stars—if it were a blog post, maybe.
Greg Egan bypasses the conventional structure of a novel, giving us instead mathematical musings in four acts. Technically Diaspora has everything a novel needs: characters, dialogue, even a plot. But with nature as the sole antagonist, the threats in this book are extremely distant. They are existential (though I hesitate to use that word when these characters are cloning themselves thousands of times over), but only in the most distant sense. This is literally a book about the end of the world as we don’t know it, and it’s almost as difficult for me to wrap my head around as the physics and mathematics are.
I think it would be tempting to seize upon the very abstract subject matter and level the charge that Diaspora is difficult because, with so many posthumans leaving flesh behind for a sixteen-dimensional universe, it loses something of what it means to be human. I understand why some people would feel this way, but I don’t think it’s the case at all. In spite of the very technical and dry dialogue between these characters, Egan makes it clear that their main concern—other than survival—is the preservation of humanity. There are, if not conflicts, then arguments between characters about the best path to take to remain human—the merits of flesh versus software, the perils of solipsism. Indeed, Diaspora is about the ultimate quest to remain human in spite of the universe itself stacking the deck against you.
I’m not going to give Diaspora five stars, because I think other authors have done this better while still delivering a very compelling story. I’m not going to give Diaspora one star, because it is an amazing collection of ideas and dialogues about humanity, progress, and physics. It’s like a really trippy blog post, just masquerading as a novel because novels, like bow ties, are cool. And like anything pretending to be something it’s not, Diaspora isn’t quite as satisfying as the conventional novel we’ve been trained to enjoy. It’s not bad, but different, and anything too different has to work a lot harder to earn acclaim. I’m willing to meet it halfway, so I’ll give it a solid three stars.
I majored in math and minored in English and philosophy; I’m teaching math and English to high school students come this fall. The intersectionality of this novel is kind of tailor-made for me—I suspect other people might have a hard time with it, and I want to be very upfront with this opinion lest my enthusiasm for the subject lead you astray. But if you are willing to make the effort and tolerate the paper-thin plot, then … wow. Yeah, in a way, totally worth it.
April 12, 2012
Ever since I read Permutation City, Egan has been one of my favorite hard sci-fi authors, and when I cracked open this book and saw that the first forty pages were a hardcore blow-by-blow of an AI becoming self- aware that would do Marvin Minsky proud, I knew that I would love it too. Brief plot synopsis: in the near future where humanity has trifurcated into AIs, sentient robots, and flesh-bound transhumans, an unexplained binary neutron star collision and subsequent gamma ray burst forces the remnants of civilization to colonize the galaxy in order to prevent such an extinction event from ever happening again. While Diaspora is of course filled with laugh-out-loud clumsy infodumps ("Say, can you tell me about your trans-universal particle physics model?" "Not until I brief you on hyperdimensional topology!"), it was also a surprisingly strong exploration of how humans – no matter if they're flesh and blood or sentient programs – cope with death and loss. I suppose that this is a common theme in Egan's works, and some of the AI characters do seem somewhat reprised from Permutation City, but Diaspora connects the deaths of individuals to the extinction of human life in a clever and meaningful way, and also ties that into personal and societal maturity (what happens when you want to simply stop exploring?) in a way that reminded me of Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad, which is high praise. Science fiction at its best uses both existing and imaginary technology to explore old human issues in new ways, and it's a shame Egan isn't more famous because he does that as well as anyone.
November 17, 2020
Diaspora is one of the greatest science fiction books I have ever read. Reading it brought into my mind a sense of wonder and of sheer visceral infinity that I hadn’t felt for years.
And yet I would recommend this ambitious hard sci-fi novel to almost no one. How can that be? How does such a strange, lonely situation arise?
Cue digression:
Have you ever seen a Shakespeare play? I mean an actual play, performed live on stage, in the original early English.
The first such play I saw was the Duchess of Malfi, written by Shakespeare’s contemporary John Webster and if you’ve never partaken of something similar, allow me to explain:
It is practically impossible to consciously track and interpret every line uttered in a play written in iambic pentameter (or some other poetical meter). On top of being in an early dialect, such lines are written for beauty and lyricism as much as they are for meaning and clarity. E.g.:
This is in STARK contrast to the media we encounter on the golden and silver screens, in which narration and dialogue must be immediately understandable by even persons of rather lackluster intelligence.
My thought, as I was watching the Duchess of Malfi, was that most of my students would find it utterly incomprehensible. Their fluency in daily English is passable, I guess, but it is almost purely functional. They get confounded any time I turn my vocab or lyricism up a notch, which I occasionally do out of an incorrigible impishness. These students would hate the play. They’d feel lost. They hadn’t gained the skills (if just because of their youth) necessary to appreciate what was going on there.
On the other hand, I absolutely *loved* Duchess of Malfi. The experience transcended my highest expectations. It felt, in many ways, like a boon the Universe was offering me, to reward my diligence in studying language and literature.
Because, sure, it’s difficult to swiftly track the meaning of every single line uttered but you don’t have to. The tropes, the conflicts, the characterizations – the big thematic stuff – are not dissimilar to those in contemporary stories. Realizing that I could apply my *modern* sense of humanity to connect with a story written FIVE centuries ago invoked a most delightful sense of empathy with, well, with dead people, a feeling I will call NECROPATHY. My ancestors were not so different than I. Their concerns were my concerns. Their humor, my humor. Their tragedy, my tragedy.
Reading Diaspora is similar to watching a Shakespeare play, except the difficulty lies not in the lyricism and age of language but in the book’s mathematical, scientific framing. I don’t just mean technical knowledge of these topics, though that is helpful in interpreting dialogue such as, “This solution [of a wormhole] has positive mass. In fact, if GR [General Relativity] held true at this scale, it would just be a pair of black holes sharing a singularity. Of course, even for the heaviest elementary particles the Schwarzchild radius is far smaller than the Planck-Wheeler length, so quantum uncertainty would disrupt any potential event horizons, and perhaps even smooth away the singularity as well. But I wanted to find a simple, geometrical model underlying the uncertainty.”
If you have no familiarity with relativity, if you don’t know a Schwarzchild radius from a trous noir, if you mostly know Heisenberg as that guy that cooks really high-quality meth in that TV show, then yeah that sentence is going to be gobbly-de-gook to you.
But even simple interpretation is not enough. It’s more than just a matter of vocabulary, it’s about understanding the deeper importance, why any of this math, science craziness even MATTERS.
In fact, I deal with this situation all the time. As a math and science teacher, I constantly must field queries along the line of, “Why do I need to learn this?” or “When will I ever use this in my career?”
This question excites me tremendously, primarily because it’s not a real question. Students ask it contemptuously, confident there is no real actual valid answer. Indeed, they aren’t actually interested in hearing the answer. What they’re really doing is materializing an excuse for their apathy (and/or low skill) toward what they’re doing. It’s OK if they don’t give a damn about what they’re doing if what they’re doing is unimportant.
UNFORTUNATELY FOR THEM, they did ask the question, and by asking it, they have voluntarily stepped into the ring with THE MATHLOSSUS.
FIE! I begin. What are you, some sort of learning mercenary? Do you only ever learn if it makes you money? Oh, how dreary such a life will be.
Math and science, I continue, are the language of the universe and, indeed, of divinity. Do you think God would deign to speak in English? Spanish? Latin? Greek? Hebrew? Arabic? How parochial! God, insofar as he exists, would speak in the language of the Universe, the Universal Language, which is the language of nature and reality, which our human-created mathematics and physics most closely approximate.
It is for this reason that never should you listen to any person who does not understand math and science speak about God. How arrogant, how brash for one who knows so little of the universe to presume to speak about the nature of it.
WELL, Diaspora, while written in English, is a story about the Universe and thus demands one know the language of the Universe.
In that sense, the book is a like a physics or engineering thriller, which is far more exciting and interesting than it sounds (provided, that is, you speak the language of the Universe). The prime quest of the novel boils down to the protagonists needing to understand the universe in order to survive.
But if that’s ALL it was, I wouldn’t be calling it the ‘one of the greatest sci-fi books I’ve ever read.’
Diaspora also offers the best (in terms of insight and realism) exploration of a post-human milieu that I’ve ever read. It begins in the year 2975 (you don’t even want to know what year it ends), at which point humanity – still in the solar system – has split into three factions: fleshers; gleisners; and ‘virtual’ humans living in polises. Fleshers are biological humans, though with advanced gene technology. Gleisners are humans who have opted for robot bodies. And those in the polis are those who have fully embraced becoming software and existing within virtual scapes – which, by the way, operate at 800 times the speed of meat existence. That is, a citizen of the polis experiences 800 years for every one year a flesher does (and yes the book explores the greater ramifications of such time dilation).
The story primarily focuses on the experience of those in the polis and does an incredible job of exploring just what it means to exist purely as software. In fact, the very first chapter involves a newly born software ‘mind-seed’ growing into self-awareness. It is absolutely stunning. It is a tour de force of genius – and the entire rest of the book is just as creative and intelligent.
And the scope! The scope of this book is enormous. I’d explain, but I don’t want to spoil, except to say despite being wildly ambitious, it feels authentic throughout. This is a testament to just how skillfully Greg Egan weaves hard sci-fi with more imaginative soft sci-fi.
So, whew, yeah. Let me summarize. I think you can enjoy this book even without a math and science background. But if you do have such a background, it is *extremely* rewarding. You absolutely owe it to yourself to read this book. It will make every other sci-fi book seem less like sci-fi and more like fantasy.
***
Addendum: If you feel intimidated, I extend the following offer: If you read this book and get stuck in the technical details, you should feel free to send me a message here. I will do my best to explain the science and math stuff – particularly its greater significance – to assist in your reading.
And yet I would recommend this ambitious hard sci-fi novel to almost no one. How can that be? How does such a strange, lonely situation arise?
Cue digression:
Have you ever seen a Shakespeare play? I mean an actual play, performed live on stage, in the original early English.
The first such play I saw was the Duchess of Malfi, written by Shakespeare’s contemporary John Webster and if you’ve never partaken of something similar, allow me to explain:
It is practically impossible to consciously track and interpret every line uttered in a play written in iambic pentameter (or some other poetical meter). On top of being in an early dialect, such lines are written for beauty and lyricism as much as they are for meaning and clarity. E.g.:
I know death hath ten thousand several doors
For men to take their exits; and 'tis found
They go on such strange geometrical hinges,
You may open them both ways: any way, for heaven-sake.
This is in STARK contrast to the media we encounter on the golden and silver screens, in which narration and dialogue must be immediately understandable by even persons of rather lackluster intelligence.
My thought, as I was watching the Duchess of Malfi, was that most of my students would find it utterly incomprehensible. Their fluency in daily English is passable, I guess, but it is almost purely functional. They get confounded any time I turn my vocab or lyricism up a notch, which I occasionally do out of an incorrigible impishness. These students would hate the play. They’d feel lost. They hadn’t gained the skills (if just because of their youth) necessary to appreciate what was going on there.
On the other hand, I absolutely *loved* Duchess of Malfi. The experience transcended my highest expectations. It felt, in many ways, like a boon the Universe was offering me, to reward my diligence in studying language and literature.
Because, sure, it’s difficult to swiftly track the meaning of every single line uttered but you don’t have to. The tropes, the conflicts, the characterizations – the big thematic stuff – are not dissimilar to those in contemporary stories. Realizing that I could apply my *modern* sense of humanity to connect with a story written FIVE centuries ago invoked a most delightful sense of empathy with, well, with dead people, a feeling I will call NECROPATHY. My ancestors were not so different than I. Their concerns were my concerns. Their humor, my humor. Their tragedy, my tragedy.
Reading Diaspora is similar to watching a Shakespeare play, except the difficulty lies not in the lyricism and age of language but in the book’s mathematical, scientific framing. I don’t just mean technical knowledge of these topics, though that is helpful in interpreting dialogue such as, “This solution [of a wormhole] has positive mass. In fact, if GR [General Relativity] held true at this scale, it would just be a pair of black holes sharing a singularity. Of course, even for the heaviest elementary particles the Schwarzchild radius is far smaller than the Planck-Wheeler length, so quantum uncertainty would disrupt any potential event horizons, and perhaps even smooth away the singularity as well. But I wanted to find a simple, geometrical model underlying the uncertainty.”
If you have no familiarity with relativity, if you don’t know a Schwarzchild radius from a trous noir, if you mostly know Heisenberg as that guy that cooks really high-quality meth in that TV show, then yeah that sentence is going to be gobbly-de-gook to you.
But even simple interpretation is not enough. It’s more than just a matter of vocabulary, it’s about understanding the deeper importance, why any of this math, science craziness even MATTERS.
In fact, I deal with this situation all the time. As a math and science teacher, I constantly must field queries along the line of, “Why do I need to learn this?” or “When will I ever use this in my career?”
This question excites me tremendously, primarily because it’s not a real question. Students ask it contemptuously, confident there is no real actual valid answer. Indeed, they aren’t actually interested in hearing the answer. What they’re really doing is materializing an excuse for their apathy (and/or low skill) toward what they’re doing. It’s OK if they don’t give a damn about what they’re doing if what they’re doing is unimportant.
UNFORTUNATELY FOR THEM, they did ask the question, and by asking it, they have voluntarily stepped into the ring with THE MATHLOSSUS.
FIE! I begin. What are you, some sort of learning mercenary? Do you only ever learn if it makes you money? Oh, how dreary such a life will be.
Math and science, I continue, are the language of the universe and, indeed, of divinity. Do you think God would deign to speak in English? Spanish? Latin? Greek? Hebrew? Arabic? How parochial! God, insofar as he exists, would speak in the language of the Universe, the Universal Language, which is the language of nature and reality, which our human-created mathematics and physics most closely approximate.
It is for this reason that never should you listen to any person who does not understand math and science speak about God. How arrogant, how brash for one who knows so little of the universe to presume to speak about the nature of it.
WELL, Diaspora, while written in English, is a story about the Universe and thus demands one know the language of the Universe.
In that sense, the book is a like a physics or engineering thriller, which is far more exciting and interesting than it sounds (provided, that is, you speak the language of the Universe). The prime quest of the novel boils down to the protagonists needing to understand the universe in order to survive.
But if that’s ALL it was, I wouldn’t be calling it the ‘one of the greatest sci-fi books I’ve ever read.’
Diaspora also offers the best (in terms of insight and realism) exploration of a post-human milieu that I’ve ever read. It begins in the year 2975 (you don’t even want to know what year it ends), at which point humanity – still in the solar system – has split into three factions: fleshers; gleisners; and ‘virtual’ humans living in polises. Fleshers are biological humans, though with advanced gene technology. Gleisners are humans who have opted for robot bodies. And those in the polis are those who have fully embraced becoming software and existing within virtual scapes – which, by the way, operate at 800 times the speed of meat existence. That is, a citizen of the polis experiences 800 years for every one year a flesher does (and yes the book explores the greater ramifications of such time dilation).
The story primarily focuses on the experience of those in the polis and does an incredible job of exploring just what it means to exist purely as software. In fact, the very first chapter involves a newly born software ‘mind-seed’ growing into self-awareness. It is absolutely stunning. It is a tour de force of genius – and the entire rest of the book is just as creative and intelligent.
And the scope! The scope of this book is enormous. I’d explain, but I don’t want to spoil, except to say despite being wildly ambitious, it feels authentic throughout. This is a testament to just how skillfully Greg Egan weaves hard sci-fi with more imaginative soft sci-fi.
So, whew, yeah. Let me summarize. I think you can enjoy this book even without a math and science background. But if you do have such a background, it is *extremely* rewarding. You absolutely owe it to yourself to read this book. It will make every other sci-fi book seem less like sci-fi and more like fantasy.
***
Addendum: If you feel intimidated, I extend the following offer: If you read this book and get stuck in the technical details, you should feel free to send me a message here. I will do my best to explain the science and math stuff – particularly its greater significance – to assist in your reading.
January 13, 2019
I am very safe in saying that this is one hell of an ambitious, dense, and thoroughly grounded novel of mind-blowing physics housed in one of the most hardcore hard-SF frames I've ever seen.
That's including Cixin Liu's recent trilogy.
I've read a lot of physics books for the sheer pleasure of it and I have a pretty good imagination, but when I was reading this particular novel, I was hard-pressed to keep up with the wall of information, exposition, and detailed descriptions of particle and quantum physics, theoretical frameworks, then more theoretical frameworks branching off the first, and then yet more in case we might have been getting used to the previously heavy load. :)
Am I complaining? No. Hell no. In fact, I'm frankly amazed and thrilled. The underlying story feels like a MORE coherent and theoretical run on Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, delving much deeper into the possibilities brought up by Contact, and it goes just about as far as you can go in transhumanism, ranging widely between regular humans, purely software/robot humans, and virtual polities within wide-umbrella AIs housing vast numbers of uploaded personalities.
The center of the galaxy went boom. It's the end of all life. Run. Run! Run!!!!! :) Vast number of years and high tech isn't enough to escape this.
What we have here is a full and vast adventure of exploration, discovery, and a mind-blowing physics reveal that not only lets the reader fall sideways through the universe and multiple dimensions, but it does it in an excellently ACCURATE direction (at least as far as we understand current physics).
The added realism is bolstered by a very excellent bibliography at the end and I can attest to the quality of at least three-quarters of them. :)
While this novel is NOT all that accessible to casual readers of SF, it IS extremely rewarding to those who are willing to sit through long theoretical (and not so theoretical) modern mind-blowing physics lessons. Is all the science necessary?
Hell yes, at least the way the plot requires them. :) This novel will not hand-hold anyone. And for that, my hat goes off. Much, much respect. :)
Oh, the novel makes me feel stupid, too. :) But that's okay. I've already sealed away a copy of it in a time capsule that will open in a thousand years for the enjoyment of our machine children with brains made of neutrinos who will have all the underpinning physics written into their bones.
:)
That's including Cixin Liu's recent trilogy.
I've read a lot of physics books for the sheer pleasure of it and I have a pretty good imagination, but when I was reading this particular novel, I was hard-pressed to keep up with the wall of information, exposition, and detailed descriptions of particle and quantum physics, theoretical frameworks, then more theoretical frameworks branching off the first, and then yet more in case we might have been getting used to the previously heavy load. :)
Am I complaining? No. Hell no. In fact, I'm frankly amazed and thrilled. The underlying story feels like a MORE coherent and theoretical run on Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, delving much deeper into the possibilities brought up by Contact, and it goes just about as far as you can go in transhumanism, ranging widely between regular humans, purely software/robot humans, and virtual polities within wide-umbrella AIs housing vast numbers of uploaded personalities.
The center of the galaxy went boom. It's the end of all life. Run. Run! Run!!!!! :) Vast number of years and high tech isn't enough to escape this.
What we have here is a full and vast adventure of exploration, discovery, and a mind-blowing physics reveal that not only lets the reader fall sideways through the universe and multiple dimensions, but it does it in an excellently ACCURATE direction (at least as far as we understand current physics).
The added realism is bolstered by a very excellent bibliography at the end and I can attest to the quality of at least three-quarters of them. :)
While this novel is NOT all that accessible to casual readers of SF, it IS extremely rewarding to those who are willing to sit through long theoretical (and not so theoretical) modern mind-blowing physics lessons. Is all the science necessary?
Hell yes, at least the way the plot requires them. :) This novel will not hand-hold anyone. And for that, my hat goes off. Much, much respect. :)
Oh, the novel makes me feel stupid, too. :) But that's okay. I've already sealed away a copy of it in a time capsule that will open in a thousand years for the enjoyment of our machine children with brains made of neutrinos who will have all the underpinning physics written into their bones.
:)
September 27, 2024
An excellent far future tale from one of the true masters of Hard SciFi.
A more detailed review to follow after a re-read, this one deserves it.
2023 Read
A more detailed review to follow after a re-read, this one deserves it.
2023 Read
September 4, 2012
If you come to hard sci-fi in search of ideas about how humanity might change as we integrate with our machines, or how the universe (or universes) might fit together well beyond the observable world we know, you might well love this book. It's got some interesting ideas. Unfortunately, it's so bogged down by over-the-top "science-ish" writing, weak character development and two oddly stitched together plots that I kept cursing in annoyance as I read, rather than delighting at the novelty of author Greg Egan's ideas.
Each of the two stitched together plots is based on a distinct premise.
The first premise: It's the distant future. People can be male, female or genderless. They can inhabit mortal bodies like our own, or genetically altered bodies, or immortal robot bodies, or they can become converted into immortal human minds/souls that live forever in the digital realm. And some people -- including Yatima -- are born digitally, the result of a DNA-like sequence that allows randomness to shape the ingredients necessary for humanity into a self-aware being. People being what they are, those who inhabit mortal bodies think theirs is the only "true" way to experience humanity, the fully digital souls don't understand why anyone would choose to be limited by the constraints of the physical world, the robot dwellers think theirs is the perfect compromise, all seem to prefer separate spheres of existence as they remain warily aware of the other modes of being.
The second premise comes a fair chunk of the way in to the book, after the first premise is firmly established: All these different kinds of folks have just become aware that world-destroying (and maybe even solar-system-destroying or galaxy-destroying) astronomical events are more likely and harder to predict than they've ever understood before. Now the race is on to find a way to escape or hide before humanity and life come to an end. It's not clear if survival requires traveling great distances across the universe, or innovations in science to create wormholes, or the discovery of non-human intelligence, or another path altogether. We follow a group of digital souls as they venture far from earth in search of understanding and salvation.
Both premises are intellectually interesting, though they seem kind of disjointed, as does the array of characters we meet along the way. The book starts by introducing us to Yatima, a genderless new-born digital soul, as "ve" explores "ver" world, and introduces us to this world along the way. We get to know and like a number of characters, and it's frustrating when, in the second half of the book, a huge chunk of these characters fade from view completely, or disappear until the last few pages.
Egan also doesn't know when to stop with his detailed explanations of the speculative/imagined science that underpins the vast world he's imagined. These explanations read like dense academic treatises, except that they aren't real science, and they bog down the book. As one of these quagmires of over-explanations opens the book, I'm amazed that thousands of readers appear to have been, like me, stubborn enough to push through to see what the story might really be about. As I read, I learned to skim the science-ese and start paying attention at the end of each of these passages. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't have made it through.
Each of the two stitched together plots is based on a distinct premise.
The first premise: It's the distant future. People can be male, female or genderless. They can inhabit mortal bodies like our own, or genetically altered bodies, or immortal robot bodies, or they can become converted into immortal human minds/souls that live forever in the digital realm. And some people -- including Yatima -- are born digitally, the result of a DNA-like sequence that allows randomness to shape the ingredients necessary for humanity into a self-aware being. People being what they are, those who inhabit mortal bodies think theirs is the only "true" way to experience humanity, the fully digital souls don't understand why anyone would choose to be limited by the constraints of the physical world, the robot dwellers think theirs is the perfect compromise, all seem to prefer separate spheres of existence as they remain warily aware of the other modes of being.
The second premise comes a fair chunk of the way in to the book, after the first premise is firmly established: All these different kinds of folks have just become aware that world-destroying (and maybe even solar-system-destroying or galaxy-destroying) astronomical events are more likely and harder to predict than they've ever understood before. Now the race is on to find a way to escape or hide before humanity and life come to an end. It's not clear if survival requires traveling great distances across the universe, or innovations in science to create wormholes, or the discovery of non-human intelligence, or another path altogether. We follow a group of digital souls as they venture far from earth in search of understanding and salvation.
Both premises are intellectually interesting, though they seem kind of disjointed, as does the array of characters we meet along the way. The book starts by introducing us to Yatima, a genderless new-born digital soul, as "ve" explores "ver" world, and introduces us to this world along the way. We get to know and like a number of characters, and it's frustrating when, in the second half of the book, a huge chunk of these characters fade from view completely, or disappear until the last few pages.
Egan also doesn't know when to stop with his detailed explanations of the speculative/imagined science that underpins the vast world he's imagined. These explanations read like dense academic treatises, except that they aren't real science, and they bog down the book. As one of these quagmires of over-explanations opens the book, I'm amazed that thousands of readers appear to have been, like me, stubborn enough to push through to see what the story might really be about. As I read, I learned to skim the science-ese and start paying attention at the end of each of these passages. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't have made it through.
May 26, 2023
4.0 Stars
I've read a few other books by this author, but this one is easily my favourite. The scientific ideas explored in this novel were so interesting. I'll admit that some of the details of the concepts went over my head, but I was completely fascinated by the parts I understood. On top of that, I felt this book still managed to have a narrative plot with cohesive characters.
I've read a few other books by this author, but this one is easily my favourite. The scientific ideas explored in this novel were so interesting. I'll admit that some of the details of the concepts went over my head, but I was completely fascinated by the parts I understood. On top of that, I felt this book still managed to have a narrative plot with cohesive characters.
January 14, 2020
Maybe I'm just too mathematically and scientifically challenged, but I just couldn't get into this one, though I had high hopes based on the reviews.
Somewhere in Egan's verbose and detailed scientific musings is a rather bland and boring story with flat characters and a dull plot.
If you love hard sci-fi and mathematics or quantum physics, then you'll probably love this book, I don't doubt it.
I just couldn't enjoy the plot and characters while having to make my way through sentences like this one every page:
This solution has positive mass. In fact, if GR held true at this scale, it would just be a pair of black holes sharing a singularity. Of course, even for the heaviest elementary particles the Schwarzschild radius is far smaller than the Planck-Wheeler length, so quantum uncertainty would disrupt any potential event horizons, and perhaps even smooth away the singularity as well. But I wanted to find a simple, geometrical model underlying that uncertainty.
It’s probably a brilliant work from a purely hard sci-fi and scientific perspective, but from a literary perspective, it fell completely flat for me.
Somewhere in Egan's verbose and detailed scientific musings is a rather bland and boring story with flat characters and a dull plot.
If you love hard sci-fi and mathematics or quantum physics, then you'll probably love this book, I don't doubt it.
I just couldn't enjoy the plot and characters while having to make my way through sentences like this one every page:
This solution has positive mass. In fact, if GR held true at this scale, it would just be a pair of black holes sharing a singularity. Of course, even for the heaviest elementary particles the Schwarzschild radius is far smaller than the Planck-Wheeler length, so quantum uncertainty would disrupt any potential event horizons, and perhaps even smooth away the singularity as well. But I wanted to find a simple, geometrical model underlying that uncertainty.
It’s probably a brilliant work from a purely hard sci-fi and scientific perspective, but from a literary perspective, it fell completely flat for me.
February 16, 2022
The one thing I know after reading this is I am not smart enough nor do I have an adequate enough vocabulary to properly review this book. I can tell you it is absolutely incredible and while dense with science and tech talk it is also very human and personal. One crazy thing is the human stuff is witnessed through the eyes of "people" very far removed from how we humans are now. It's all weird and bonkers but it all works and makes for a mind blowing reading experience.
November 26, 2014
I love the super-technical approach in this book. There is a rich combination of hard-core chemistry, biology, particle physics, astronomy, cosmology, mathematics; and that is on top of technologies like super-computing, artificial intelligence and bio-engineering. The first section on the pre-birth development of Yatima is mind-blowing; bio-engineering, psycho-engineering, just a wealth of concepts that left me breathless.
There are three types of "people" in the story. There are regular human beings--sort of like Luddites. There are robots that run on artificial intelligence. And there are "polises", that are pure personalities that are run on super-computers. Most of the story is about the polises, who are super-intelligent spirits (?) that drop mind seeds with clones of themselves onto various planets.
The drama starts when an astronomer notices that the rotation rate of nearby double neutron star system starts to slow down. The slow-down is much more rapid than could be expected from known physics. When the neutron star system comes to a stop, an intense cosmic ray shower is expected to disrupt life on Earth.
And then, things start to get really weird. Infinite dimensions. Infinite universes. I'm not sure exactly what a "character" in the book really is. "People" just aren't what they used to be. And I can't figure out how characters/clones get from one star system to another, from one set of dimensions to another set, or from one universe to the next. As Yogi Berra said, "The future isn't what it used to be."
There are three types of "people" in the story. There are regular human beings--sort of like Luddites. There are robots that run on artificial intelligence. And there are "polises", that are pure personalities that are run on super-computers. Most of the story is about the polises, who are super-intelligent spirits (?) that drop mind seeds with clones of themselves onto various planets.
The drama starts when an astronomer notices that the rotation rate of nearby double neutron star system starts to slow down. The slow-down is much more rapid than could be expected from known physics. When the neutron star system comes to a stop, an intense cosmic ray shower is expected to disrupt life on Earth.
And then, things start to get really weird. Infinite dimensions. Infinite universes. I'm not sure exactly what a "character" in the book really is. "People" just aren't what they used to be. And I can't figure out how characters/clones get from one star system to another, from one set of dimensions to another set, or from one universe to the next. As Yogi Berra said, "The future isn't what it used to be."
January 27, 2019
ах, если бы я могла поставить шесть звёздочек!
пожалуй, милее всего моему сердцу в этой книге то, что убедителен не только описанный мир далёкого будущего — но и уровень проблематики, которую она поднимает. людей пятого тысячелетия, давно оцифрованных и роботизированных, не волнуют нелепые мясные проблемы, кажущиеся нам вечными: войны, размножение, гендеры, религии, настроения, убеждения, даже свобода личности. все эти вопросы настолько давно решены, что затрагиваются разве что вскользь (ну, да, у каждого цифрового полиса есть свои убеждения, и каждый гражданин волен перебраться в тот, что соответствует структуре его личности — и это столь очевидно, что ему факту уделена лишь пара строчек).
что же интересует этих самых людей будущего — а вместе с ними и автора? физика, математика и коммуникация. собственно, основное тело книги составляют проблемы типа «как будет организована материя в пятимерном пространстве и почему там невозможно стабильное орбитальное движение» или «почему же нам не удаётся создать червоточину, движение через которую было бы быстрее скорости света, хоть теоретически это и возможно».
и это, чёрт побери, прекрасно, прекрасно до слёз.
да, это довольно безэмоциональная книга: в ней нет острого драматизма или ярко выраженного конфликта, кроме конфликта человека и познания вселенной. но скучной я бы её не назвала. ставки постоянно растут, знаний прибавляется, а некоторые открытия героев (например, некоторые сорта инопланетян) чрезвычайно изобретательны.
отдельно хочется отметить первую главу. она описывает возникновение (цифрового) сознания: от базового уровня, условной зиготы, до осознания своего «я». от первого (ещё не существующего) лица. это чрезвычайно познавательно, но ещё и захватывающе, будто к таинству какому-то приобщился, и, мне кажется, в конечном итоге даёт нам всем более глубокое понимание природы человека.
в общем, блестящая книга.
пожалуй, милее всего моему сердцу в этой книге то, что убедителен не только описанный мир далёкого будущего — но и уровень проблематики, которую она поднимает. людей пятого тысячелетия, давно оцифрованных и роботизированных, не волнуют нелепые мясные проблемы, кажущиеся нам вечными: войны, размножение, гендеры, религии, настроения, убеждения, даже свобода личности. все эти вопросы настолько давно решены, что затрагиваются разве что вскользь (ну, да, у каждого цифрового полиса есть свои убеждения, и каждый гражданин волен перебраться в тот, что соответствует структуре его личности — и это столь очевидно, что ему факту уделена лишь пара строчек).
что же интересует этих самых людей будущего — а вместе с ними и автора? физика, математика и коммуникация. собственно, основное тело книги составляют проблемы типа «как будет организована материя в пятимерном пространстве и почему там невозможно стабильное орбитальное движение» или «почему же нам не удаётся создать червоточину, движение через которую было бы быстрее скорости света, хоть теоретически это и возможно».
и это, чёрт побери, прекрасно, прекрасно до слёз.
да, это довольно безэмоциональная книга: в ней нет острого драматизма или ярко выраженного конфликта, кроме конфликта человека и познания вселенной. но скучной я бы её не назвала. ставки постоянно растут, знаний прибавляется, а некоторые открытия героев (например, некоторые сорта инопланетян) чрезвычайно изобретательны.
отдельно хочется отметить первую главу. она описывает возникновение (цифрового) сознания: от базового уровня, условной зиготы, до осознания своего «я». от первого (ещё не существующего) лица. это чрезвычайно познавательно, но ещё и захватывающе, будто к таинству какому-то приобщился, и, мне кажется, в конечном итоге даёт нам всем более глубокое понимание природы человека.
в общем, блестящая книга.
March 11, 2020
A brilliant, yet excruciatingly detailed, look at the future of humanity and transhumanism. Egan's rich vision of the fragmented legacies of humanity on a mission to explore the galaxy and way beyond is unbelievably bold and visionary, yet is frequently bogged down with excruciating scientific detail that often seems to supersede actual storytelling. This has got to be the hardest of the hard science fiction I have come across. Not easy reading. My mind was equally numbed and blown. No doubt it will leave a lasting impression.
November 28, 2013
Hablar de Greg Egan, es hablar de la ciencia ficción más hard que se pueda encontrar en nuestros días. Cuando Egan pone su imaginación en marcha es difícil de igualar. ‘Diáspora’ es una de las novelas más duras a las que me he enfrentado, no tanto por el argumento, sino por el lenguaje científico que maneja, que abarca matemáticas, física, biología, metafísica, cosmología, astrofísica o química. Egan no dibuja en profundidad a sus personajes, son meras piezas en su desfile de teorías, a cual más increíble. Egan es un escritor que sabe poner en liza ideas y pensamientos que inquietan, o deberían inquietar, a todo el género humano.
Desde el primer capítulo, Egan empieza fuerte, sin concesiones al lector, con la descripción minuciosa del nacimiento de Yatima, una personalidad artificial consciente dentro de la Polis Konishi. Tras ese gran comienzo, iremos conociendo en qué consiste las Polis y cómo viven sus habitantes. En el año 3000 existen tres tipos diferentes de habitantes en la Tierra: los carnosos, que todavía mantienen sus cuerpos biológicos, dividiéndose a su vez en dos clases, los que han sufrido modificaciones genéticas y los que no; los gleisners, que son entidades robóticas que contienen una inteligencia artificial consciente; y los habitantes de las Polis, que son entidades incorpóreas que viven dentro de ordenadores.
La trama de ’Diáspora’ transcurre en las Polis, con su propio espacio y tiempo, donde sus habitantes viven dedicados a construir sus propios entornos virtuales, generando modelos matemáticos para demostrar sus propias teorías, por ejemplo. En este mundo tan particular, es posible copiarse a sí mismo, con las diferencias entre el “yo” y la copia que esto suscita. Todo parece transcurrir pacíficamente para los distintos habitantes, hasta que se descubre que la Tierra se va a ver amenazada seriamente. Ante una amenaza inminente, estos post-humanos se embarcan en una búsqueda de respuestas por la galaxia, respuestas que tal vez conozcan los llamados Transmutadores.
’Diáspora’ no es una novela fácil, pero sí es muy satisfactoria en muchos niveles. Las ideas y teorías que maneja Egan son apabullantes. Egan es capaz de imaginar desde una vida dentro de una Inteligencia Artificial, hasta plantearte un universo de 6 dimensiones, o el encuentro con una entidad extraterrestre de lo más impredecible.
Recomendaría esta novela únicamente a lectores muy aficionados a la ciencia ficción más dura. Los fans de Greg Egan no se verán defraudados, aunque personalmente prefiero sus relatos.
Desde el primer capítulo, Egan empieza fuerte, sin concesiones al lector, con la descripción minuciosa del nacimiento de Yatima, una personalidad artificial consciente dentro de la Polis Konishi. Tras ese gran comienzo, iremos conociendo en qué consiste las Polis y cómo viven sus habitantes. En el año 3000 existen tres tipos diferentes de habitantes en la Tierra: los carnosos, que todavía mantienen sus cuerpos biológicos, dividiéndose a su vez en dos clases, los que han sufrido modificaciones genéticas y los que no; los gleisners, que son entidades robóticas que contienen una inteligencia artificial consciente; y los habitantes de las Polis, que son entidades incorpóreas que viven dentro de ordenadores.
La trama de ’Diáspora’ transcurre en las Polis, con su propio espacio y tiempo, donde sus habitantes viven dedicados a construir sus propios entornos virtuales, generando modelos matemáticos para demostrar sus propias teorías, por ejemplo. En este mundo tan particular, es posible copiarse a sí mismo, con las diferencias entre el “yo” y la copia que esto suscita. Todo parece transcurrir pacíficamente para los distintos habitantes, hasta que se descubre que la Tierra se va a ver amenazada seriamente. Ante una amenaza inminente, estos post-humanos se embarcan en una búsqueda de respuestas por la galaxia, respuestas que tal vez conozcan los llamados Transmutadores.
’Diáspora’ no es una novela fácil, pero sí es muy satisfactoria en muchos niveles. Las ideas y teorías que maneja Egan son apabullantes. Egan es capaz de imaginar desde una vida dentro de una Inteligencia Artificial, hasta plantearte un universo de 6 dimensiones, o el encuentro con una entidad extraterrestre de lo más impredecible.
Recomendaría esta novela únicamente a lectores muy aficionados a la ciencia ficción más dura. Los fans de Greg Egan no se verán defraudados, aunque personalmente prefiero sus relatos.
January 19, 2023
My 1997 booklog says: "A," excellent novel, reread sometime. Per an author's note, the book is (in part) an expansion of his award-winning novelette "Wang's Carpets" (1995). I recall liking that story. Here is a good summary: http://bestsciencefictionstories.com/...
Note: many of the author's stories are available online at his website, https://www.gregegan.net/BIBLIOGRAPHY... -- but not Wang's! Which are, btw, a real math concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_tile
Attempting a reread 11/7/21. A more forbidding first chapter would be hard to imagine!
Let's see what others here say before I press on....
Here's my reliable GR friend Kara Babcock, https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
"I want to give this book five stars. I want to give this book one star. It’s amazing. It’s terrible."
So, back it goes! Always good to check out old novels, as libraries keep track, and often discard ones nobody checks out. A word to the wise... And I'm leaving up my old rating, as I read it in (obviously) a more-receptive frame of mind. It's not really fair (imo) to downrate a book because of an abandoned reread attempt. Likewise, it would be a disservice to readers to pretend it didn't happen.
Note: many of the author's stories are available online at his website, https://www.gregegan.net/BIBLIOGRAPHY... -- but not Wang's! Which are, btw, a real math concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_tile
Attempting a reread 11/7/21. A more forbidding first chapter would be hard to imagine!
Let's see what others here say before I press on....
Here's my reliable GR friend Kara Babcock, https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
"I want to give this book five stars. I want to give this book one star. It’s amazing. It’s terrible."
So, back it goes! Always good to check out old novels, as libraries keep track, and often discard ones nobody checks out. A word to the wise... And I'm leaving up my old rating, as I read it in (obviously) a more-receptive frame of mind. It's not really fair (imo) to downrate a book because of an abandoned reread attempt. Likewise, it would be a disservice to readers to pretend it didn't happen.
June 4, 2012
Absolutely stunning concepts are fired at you every couple of pages, coupled with a writing style which makes hard science-fiction just about comprehensible. The feeling of the vertigo of extreme knowledge reminds me of Arthur C Clarke and Olaf Stapledon at their unsettlingly cognizant best.
Importantly, it's worth noting that this is a narrative leap forward from it's spiritual predecessor, Permutation City, which tended towards being quite dry, despite it's philosophical enormity. In Diaspora, Egan manages to create a compelling narrative despite the ludicrous timescales and scope existential scope.
This is an affecting, thought provoking and energetic treatment of the meaning of life taken to many absolute extremes. Both complete solipsism and limitless personal expansion are investigated, as are the seemingly infinite and arbitrary positions in between. Not since reading Star Maker or The City and the Stars have I been so energised by the possibilities of scope for a narrative.
Spectacular.
Importantly, it's worth noting that this is a narrative leap forward from it's spiritual predecessor, Permutation City, which tended towards being quite dry, despite it's philosophical enormity. In Diaspora, Egan manages to create a compelling narrative despite the ludicrous timescales and scope existential scope.
This is an affecting, thought provoking and energetic treatment of the meaning of life taken to many absolute extremes. Both complete solipsism and limitless personal expansion are investigated, as are the seemingly infinite and arbitrary positions in between. Not since reading Star Maker or The City and the Stars have I been so energised by the possibilities of scope for a narrative.
Spectacular.
August 28, 2024
It’s the things we don’t know that will kill us.
Well, this is just going to spoil everything else for me. I like big ideas and challenging scenarios, but this is going to be hard to beat in terms of overload.
This was my first Egan. In fact, I’d actually had Diaspora on my radar for quite some time. I fully intend to read more of his work, but not until some of this has percolated a bit.
Different macrospheres containing different universes with different dimensions and laws of physics? What again?
The author does a remarkable job keeping the reader engaged with the narrative, despite the overwhelming amount of techspeak. However, I couldn’t help but become a bit detached toward the end. It’s almost impossible to remain emotionally invested in the characters, which is, I suppose, at the heart of what the author is trying to address on a philosophical level. It’s no doubt an exceedingly clever novel in many ways.
It becomes an academic exercise. There is no way of possibly envisioning or imagining what the author is describing. Egan knows his stuff, though, and when current science does not fit his vision, he simply invents new theories. It is also very, very hard to read, so it’s a good thing that it the page count is quite reasonable.
Reminded me a bit of Star Maker – a truly good book, but one star subtracted because of broken teeth.
In closing: it’s probably worth mentioning that Diaspora does a very good job of capturing the “damned if you, damned if you don’t” nature of technology.
Too detailed and complex to take in, too distracting not to try.
Well, this is just going to spoil everything else for me. I like big ideas and challenging scenarios, but this is going to be hard to beat in terms of overload.
This was my first Egan. In fact, I’d actually had Diaspora on my radar for quite some time. I fully intend to read more of his work, but not until some of this has percolated a bit.
Different macrospheres containing different universes with different dimensions and laws of physics? What again?
The author does a remarkable job keeping the reader engaged with the narrative, despite the overwhelming amount of techspeak. However, I couldn’t help but become a bit detached toward the end. It’s almost impossible to remain emotionally invested in the characters, which is, I suppose, at the heart of what the author is trying to address on a philosophical level. It’s no doubt an exceedingly clever novel in many ways.
It becomes an academic exercise. There is no way of possibly envisioning or imagining what the author is describing. Egan knows his stuff, though, and when current science does not fit his vision, he simply invents new theories. It is also very, very hard to read, so it’s a good thing that it the page count is quite reasonable.
Reminded me a bit of Star Maker – a truly good book, but one star subtracted because of broken teeth.
In closing: it’s probably worth mentioning that Diaspora does a very good job of capturing the “damned if you, damned if you don’t” nature of technology.
Too detailed and complex to take in, too distracting not to try.
May 2, 2024
Ιt is not easy to rate this book, which I read in Greek translation. The book has an immense wealth of ideas, each of which could be developed into a separate book. This was amazing. Only for that, the book could be rated 5 stars.
On the other hand, the author explained extensively his ideas with scientific analyses, which are beyond the understanding of the average reader. This I guess is very fine in a hard science fiction book, with emphasis on explaining everything scientifically.
The development of characters could be better, but I guess Egan's emphasis is not on that, but rather on the ideas presented. If somebody is interested in characters, this book is not for him.
Recommended for hard SF readers with bent for science.
On the other hand, the author explained extensively his ideas with scientific analyses, which are beyond the understanding of the average reader. This I guess is very fine in a hard science fiction book, with emphasis on explaining everything scientifically.
The development of characters could be better, but I guess Egan's emphasis is not on that, but rather on the ideas presented. If somebody is interested in characters, this book is not for him.
Recommended for hard SF readers with bent for science.
July 17, 2013
In the past few weeks this is the second book I could not finish.
It has some great ideas, such as the birth of an artificial intelligence, and the state of humanity nine hundred years later (and others I will never discover now). My problem was the way they were presented.
The first forty pages were about the birth of an AI. The text was very technical. I can imagine that someone with more knowledge on informatics or other related sciences could enjoy it, but I didn't understand what was going on, and started to skip pages.
Then I got really bored when this "new-born" started to investigate the mathematics of multi-dimensional objects (OK, I'm simplifying here). I'm sorry, I'm not mathematician, I have bought the book to enjoy a good scifi story.
Talking about the story: it was quite flat (as far as I got into it). The characters were two-dimensional, and the plot didn't get my interest.
I'm sorry that I had to put down this book, I heard a lot of nice opinions about the author.
It has some great ideas, such as the birth of an artificial intelligence, and the state of humanity nine hundred years later (and others I will never discover now). My problem was the way they were presented.
The first forty pages were about the birth of an AI. The text was very technical. I can imagine that someone with more knowledge on informatics or other related sciences could enjoy it, but I didn't understand what was going on, and started to skip pages.
Then I got really bored when this "new-born" started to investigate the mathematics of multi-dimensional objects (OK, I'm simplifying here). I'm sorry, I'm not mathematician, I have bought the book to enjoy a good scifi story.
Talking about the story: it was quite flat (as far as I got into it). The characters were two-dimensional, and the plot didn't get my interest.
I'm sorry that I had to put down this book, I heard a lot of nice opinions about the author.
October 12, 2009
one of the few books I'd rate a 6.
May 7, 2011
My memories of when I used to subscribe to the science fiction magazine Interzone in the 80s and 90s are largely of two types of stories. The magazine had a penchant for a brand of rather gloomy anti-cyberpunk futurism (especially in the 80s, with Britain under Thatcher's iron heel when everything looked bleak, and era which also gave rise to such wonderfully dark comics as V for Vendetta and Crisis) of a sort that made Jeff Noon's books look positively utopian (I'm sure Noon must have had stories in IZ, come to think of it, but I can't remember any). The second sort were dazzlingly high-concept explorations of the interface between technology and society, and where ever hastening scientific and technological progress might be taking us as a species.
This is where I first came into contact with Australian author Greg Egan, an Interzone regular and prime purveyor of this latter type of story. Egan's 1997 novel Diaspora is a superb example of his work. It starts toward the end of the 30th century when humanity has split into different strains – as software entities living rapid yet immortal lives in virtual reality, or interacting with the physical world inhabiting robotic bodies, or a few 'fleshers', humans who doggedly remain attached to their biological reality. An unforeseen astrophysical disaster causes some of the digital personalities to send out copies of themselves to explore the universe in search of somewhere safe from potential annihilation from cosmic accidents.
This is not just an updating of Stapledon's Last and First Men or Wells' The Time Machine to the information age, where biological evolution continues seamlessly into electronic, but an exploration of what it means to be human, to be conscious, to be intelligent. Is the only way to be human to remain in direct contact with the physical world and live a life measured in decades, or can a piece of software that is at least as complex and possessed of its own drives and personality and autonomy, that wants to survive and learn and has morals and ethics be also considered human? As the environments in which humans live are artificial anyway, is living in an entirely virtual world any less valid?
Along with a story that presents these issues, Egan takes us into areas of multi-dimensional maths and wormhole physics that stretch the readers' minds just as much, all told with a clarity and skill that makes Egan one of the finest and most important writers working in SF today.
Read this if you like Neal Stephenson and Charles Stross. Other books on a similar theme include Stross' Saturn's Children and the wonderful Natural History by Justina Robson (both of whom are from Leeds, which is an interesting coincidence).
June 16, 2023
greg egan defends his crown as the hardest motherfucker writing fiction and wows us with his almost unique ability to make autism real on the printed page. there's a plot and characters in this one, like his other books. they're all kinda genderless (yet at the same time kinda gendered), like his other books. egan's awesome power lies in part in how you know all his characters watch anime despite him never needing to explicitly say they watch anime.
once again he includes a sex scene, or maybe it was javascript.
the casus aspie this time is binary neutron stars which, rather than expending most of their gravitational potential energy as gravitational waves during terminal-millisecond inspiraling (the sweet "chirps" of LIGO), divest their angular momentum via retrorockets of mesons due to a wacky QCD effect in their cores. rather less satisfying than schild's ladder's Quietener and novo-vacuum. there were no images so striking as that latter's rindler trundling along at half light speed a few meters in front of the expanding sphere. while it sounds kinda ridiculous, there were no moments so fraught with emotion as the title scene of schild's ladder either, which come to think of it was literally just a lesson in differential geometry atop Levi-Civita parallelogramoids. i guess it was emotional because the protagonist's father was teaching him the construction? which says a lot about the level of emotion in greg egan novels.
i liked the little topological adventure when Bianca/Blanca figured out the degrees of freedom of the fibers, though i liked it less because i hated Bianca/Blanca, who was obnoxious as hell, and clearly a woman yet insisted on this "ve" horseshit, and the printing in this copy wasn't great so i was never sure whether she was Bianca or Blanca, and if she was Bianca that's a breath freshener, and if she was Blanca that's a green monster from Street Fighter II. ver name ought have just been Pretentious Bitch but i suppose that's too gendered so call ver Asshole.
i liked when Ishurito, whom i always imagined as a ninja because his name was japanese, ate the heroin meme and fucked off. as far as Old Man Dank is concerned, Ishurito won the Diaspora.
anyway, as always, greg egan is fun because even if someone is fairly smart and literate and sociable and asks "what're you reading?" you can hand it to them, and watch their smile melt away as their day is slowly ruined until they hand it back to you and are like "nevermind, man, nevermind" and you reply "yeah fuck outta here with your human shit."
once again he includes a sex scene, or maybe it was javascript.
the casus aspie this time is binary neutron stars which, rather than expending most of their gravitational potential energy as gravitational waves during terminal-millisecond inspiraling (the sweet "chirps" of LIGO), divest their angular momentum via retrorockets of mesons due to a wacky QCD effect in their cores. rather less satisfying than schild's ladder's Quietener and novo-vacuum. there were no images so striking as that latter's rindler trundling along at half light speed a few meters in front of the expanding sphere. while it sounds kinda ridiculous, there were no moments so fraught with emotion as the title scene of schild's ladder either, which come to think of it was literally just a lesson in differential geometry atop Levi-Civita parallelogramoids. i guess it was emotional because the protagonist's father was teaching him the construction? which says a lot about the level of emotion in greg egan novels.
i liked the little topological adventure when Bianca/Blanca figured out the degrees of freedom of the fibers, though i liked it less because i hated Bianca/Blanca, who was obnoxious as hell, and clearly a woman yet insisted on this "ve" horseshit, and the printing in this copy wasn't great so i was never sure whether she was Bianca or Blanca, and if she was Bianca that's a breath freshener, and if she was Blanca that's a green monster from Street Fighter II. ver name ought have just been Pretentious Bitch but i suppose that's too gendered so call ver Asshole.
i liked when Ishurito, whom i always imagined as a ninja because his name was japanese, ate the heroin meme and fucked off. as far as Old Man Dank is concerned, Ishurito won the Diaspora.
anyway, as always, greg egan is fun because even if someone is fairly smart and literate and sociable and asks "what're you reading?" you can hand it to them, and watch their smile melt away as their day is slowly ruined until they hand it back to you and are like "nevermind, man, nevermind" and you reply "yeah fuck outta here with your human shit."
April 12, 2015
I'm more of a soft sci-fi than a hard sci-fi guy, and Diaspora ranks nanocrystalline adamantium on the hardness scale. There's a lot of fundamental particles-as-wormholes theory, virtual humans, extra dimensions, astronomical events and the like. But it's also surprisingly human.
It asks plenty of interesting questions. Like, what does identity mean if you can shape your form and outlook at will? And if you can clone yourself as much as you like, what does that do to relationships? Are you still human if you're virtually immortal and can experience time at your own speed? Do you need a body for love and intimacy? Is it ok to grow so far apart you can no longer communicate; do we need to bridge or let go? What are the limits to individual choice?
Humanity, relationships, choice, responsibility, death, loss and guilt form the core of the book, and the sometimes lengthy theoretical physics expositions don't detract from that.
The book is structured episodically, with different sections of the book often far apart in time and theme. This makes the start a bit rough, but it's not an accurate representation of the rest of the book. Ultimately, I think it works wonderfully well, although Diaspora certainly isn't a traditional plot-driven character-focused novel. If you enjoy philosophically and intellectually challenging science fiction, set your expectations and ideas about what makes a good story aside and give Diaspora a read.
It asks plenty of interesting questions. Like, what does identity mean if you can shape your form and outlook at will? And if you can clone yourself as much as you like, what does that do to relationships? Are you still human if you're virtually immortal and can experience time at your own speed? Do you need a body for love and intimacy? Is it ok to grow so far apart you can no longer communicate; do we need to bridge or let go? What are the limits to individual choice?
Humanity, relationships, choice, responsibility, death, loss and guilt form the core of the book, and the sometimes lengthy theoretical physics expositions don't detract from that.
The book is structured episodically, with different sections of the book often far apart in time and theme. This makes the start a bit rough, but it's not an accurate representation of the rest of the book. Ultimately, I think it works wonderfully well, although Diaspora certainly isn't a traditional plot-driven character-focused novel. If you enjoy philosophically and intellectually challenging science fiction, set your expectations and ideas about what makes a good story aside and give Diaspora a read.
September 6, 2016
Primero de todo decir que las dos estrellas en verdad no son reales, es la nota que le he puesto al ser un libro que no estaba preparado para leer.
Para leer Diáspora uno debe de tener unos conocimientos científicos bastante amplios, o bien ser un fanático de la ciencia ficción más extrema.
Y es que este libro no lo clasificaría como Hard Scifi, creo que se merecería su propio termino propio, algo como Extreme Scifi XD
Si como en mi caso no dispones de una base científica amplia, te recomiendo que huyas de esta lectura.
Os dejo el enlace a mi blog con una opinión algo más extensa del tema.
http://fantasiascifiymuchomas.blogspo...
Para leer Diáspora uno debe de tener unos conocimientos científicos bastante amplios, o bien ser un fanático de la ciencia ficción más extrema.
Y es que este libro no lo clasificaría como Hard Scifi, creo que se merecería su propio termino propio, algo como Extreme Scifi XD
Si como en mi caso no dispones de una base científica amplia, te recomiendo que huyas de esta lectura.
Os dejo el enlace a mi blog con una opinión algo más extensa del tema.
http://fantasiascifiymuchomas.blogspo...
December 2, 2018
Really solid stuff. Solid in it's composition and contents. Thick as one could ask for from fiction, yet flows like quicksilver. Imaginative story with a beginning that was so well executed I was recommending the book before page 60. As always, Mr. Egan's theoretical abilities create a thoroughly rewarding experience.
April 10, 2017
Science fiction as a literary endevour is at a natural disadvantage. A novel set in the distant future cannot take for granted any common points of reference. It is forced to explain itself, to construct worlds and cultures through description and exposition. Furthermore the characters are often alien (perhaps literally) and are difficult to relate to. How can one feel sympathy for characters a thousand years removed, whose experiences are so vastly different from our own?
To overcome these limitations, many writers simply take a science fiction premise and shoehorn in a pop-fiction plot structure, with characters that are by any meaningful measure essentially the same as people living today. For me, this approach completely destroys any potential or interest that the premise may have held. What you end up with is a generic political thriller IN SPACE, or a murder mystery ON THE MOON. This is the worst of all garbage - science fiction completely devoid of any depth or meaning.
For all the faults of this book, I truly respect Greg Egan for taking the opposite approach. Diaspora is a novel with a poorly-plotted, clunky and disjointed story, and completely flat and uninteresting characters. The writing is not in the least subtle, and is devoid of any remarkable qualities. In short, Diaspora is terrible literature. But, it is very good science fiction. It is a grand though experiment, exploring the infinite possibilities of the universe. The speculative physics is detailed and demanding. This is very hard science fiction indeed. It challenges the reader to visualise and understand multi dimensional topography, the minute interactions of quantum particles, the movement of astronomical bodies, and the functioning of complex AI systems.
In fact, I actually found myself wishing that Egan had gone even further to discard the normal conventions of fiction, and explore the themes in an even more direct and immersive way. I felt the characters retained a little too much of their humanity. For example, Diaspora attempts something interesting with pronouns, but this only reinforced for me the limitations of human language. In fact all the dialogue seemed in some respects out of place. Why are these purely digital beings having awkward conversations through linear dialogue? Maybe this sounds a little strange, and I suppose I am here in a sense entering my own realm of speculative fiction. Maybe what I'm asking for is poorly thought out and would not work. It could be that there are simply some limitations inherent in the genre that we have to live with.
To overcome these limitations, many writers simply take a science fiction premise and shoehorn in a pop-fiction plot structure, with characters that are by any meaningful measure essentially the same as people living today. For me, this approach completely destroys any potential or interest that the premise may have held. What you end up with is a generic political thriller IN SPACE, or a murder mystery ON THE MOON. This is the worst of all garbage - science fiction completely devoid of any depth or meaning.
For all the faults of this book, I truly respect Greg Egan for taking the opposite approach. Diaspora is a novel with a poorly-plotted, clunky and disjointed story, and completely flat and uninteresting characters. The writing is not in the least subtle, and is devoid of any remarkable qualities. In short, Diaspora is terrible literature. But, it is very good science fiction. It is a grand though experiment, exploring the infinite possibilities of the universe. The speculative physics is detailed and demanding. This is very hard science fiction indeed. It challenges the reader to visualise and understand multi dimensional topography, the minute interactions of quantum particles, the movement of astronomical bodies, and the functioning of complex AI systems.
In fact, I actually found myself wishing that Egan had gone even further to discard the normal conventions of fiction, and explore the themes in an even more direct and immersive way. I felt the characters retained a little too much of their humanity. For example, Diaspora attempts something interesting with pronouns, but this only reinforced for me the limitations of human language. In fact all the dialogue seemed in some respects out of place. Why are these purely digital beings having awkward conversations through linear dialogue? Maybe this sounds a little strange, and I suppose I am here in a sense entering my own realm of speculative fiction. Maybe what I'm asking for is poorly thought out and would not work. It could be that there are simply some limitations inherent in the genre that we have to live with.
May 8, 2012
Comienzo del libro:
El comienzo del libro es duro, definitivamente es duro y puede disuadir a más de uno a seguir leyendo (aunque no a mí).
La originalidad de la propuesta del autor (no se parece a nada de lo que yo haya leído hasta ahora, que no es poco) es uno de los alicientes que me impulsó a seguir, ya que el lector comparte la confusión inicial del protagonista cuando viene al mundo, un mundo con una Humanidad muy distinta (y diversa) a la que se plantea en la SciFi generalmente.
En este principio que llevo leído la terminología del libro (muy próxima al mundo de la Inteligencia Arrificial) tiene el mayor peso de entre todos los elementos.
Confío en que a partir de ahora el esfuerzo de lectura vaya siendo cada vez menor...
Con el 27% leído:
Puedo decir que o yo me he ajustado o el nivel de exigencia de la obra se ha reducido un poco, pudiendo leer pasajes más largos sin quedar con la cabeza zumbando. Me explico: la obra sigue manteniendo exigencias de corte matemático, físico y astrofísico al lector, unas exigencias que no podríamos considerar menores. Sin embargo, a partir del 10% podemos decir que los personajes ya son reconocidos como tales, con sus motivaciones y demás características psicológicas que los distinguen del panorama general de la obra.
Ya a esta altura del 27% uno tiene un conocimiento de la propuesta evolutiva que Greg propone para el ser humano en tres derivaciones: ciudadanos, gleisners y carnosos, resultando en una tensión de plausibilidad soportable. Es una propuesta que enlaza las tres derivaciones en un momento de conflicto, a la vez que va desgranando aquí y allá pistas históricas que explican su génesis, en una suerte de ejercicio intelectual para que el lector no pierda la visión de conjunto.
Me ha costado, pero a estas alturas ya puedo decir que me está gustando :-)
A la mitad del libro
Se puede decir que el lector ya tiene todas las claves precisas para poder afrontar el libro (creo), y a partir de aquí se desarrolla toda la historia de la Diáspora en sí.
La introducción de las variables psicológicas en los personajes (a pesar de la distancia entre las diversas formas humanas) es un hecho asentado, y permite ir viendo la evolución de los mismos según se van enfrentando a las situaciones. Quien pensabas que iba a ir en una determinada dirección se estanca y al más abstracto lo ves refugiándose en las emociones más humanas para poder ofrecer soluciones a los problemas intelectuales que obstaculizan la salvación de la especie... todo dentro de los límites de la naturaleza de dichos personajes, claro está...
Con el 75% leído
Algunos de los personajes secundarios pasan a ser los principales, sin perder referencias a los ya conocidos, por lo que el lector no pierde referencias a estas alturas, se siente acompañado y familiar con los mismos. Y eso que esta parte del libro ya va incorporando muchas novedades en la exploración del Universo, revelando posibilidades no demasiado mencionadas en las novelas Sci-Fi al uso, entrando en el detalle científico a la hora de explicarlas.
Me llama la atención la consideración de lo psicológico del autor, como lo que sin duda nos define como seres humanos, y los matices que se aprecian entre los ciudadanos, gleisners y carnosos... Dichos matices no son cortes gruesos que impidieran a un ser humano poder cambiar entre esas "formas", aunque sí transforman su campo de experiencia, sobre todo a nivel fenomenológico.
Con el 100% leído
La historia se cierra con el final de la exploración, no hay pie para secuelas, aunque posiblemente no es el final que la mayoría esperábamos. Al menos no yo. Confieso que me pareció un poco solipsista, y que el reduccionismo que subyace al modelo psicológico de la Humanidad descrita me ha parecido un poco frustrante, aunque opino que nunca terminan de creérselo del todo aquellos defensores de esas posturas. Parece quedar algún lugar para las emociones, aunque siempre de forma atenuada, supeditadas al ejercicio cognitivo.
En fin, me ha parecido un gran libro, en el que la lectura es difícil, pero superada esa primera parte, es sobrellevable, y la expectativa de la resolución del argumento nos da alas. Es todo un viaje en busca de un destino cuya recompensa es terminarlo, de una manera elegante y simétrica.
Extra: Me ha encantado una de las conclusiones de este libro tan denso, que ya se ha podido ilustrar a estas alturas del libro: la vida no entiende de atajos. Y me ha gustado porque la llevo en mi acervo particular desde hace muchos años, como una constatación de una especie de ley del karma que realmente funciona... aunque a veces estemos ofuscados y no nos lo parezca ;-)
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